Slots are coming to Maryland. They will be installed in Cecil County, just a stone’s throw away from where I live in Harford County.
Even Maryland’s compulsive gamblers may not be as excited at this prospect as Maryland’s non-gamblers. They believe public education will get a shot in its anemic arm thanks to the money Maryland stands to gain from fools with nothing better to do than play slots. We’ve had the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties and the hippie era; we now live in the epoch of the gambler.
Wall Street gambled away our investments and retirement savings. Banks bet on people who never had the capital or capacity to return the money borrowed. Securities firms packaged these bets as real investments and sold them to gamblers all over the world.
Home buyers bet that they would somehow scrape up the money to pay for the homes that didn’t fit their pocket books. Credit card companies kept loaning to the bettors so they could buy, lend, invest and bet some more. When the gigantic global economic slot machine finally yawned and nothing fell out of its mouth, governments fed its belly with newly minted money and begged the gamblers to return and feed at this trough.
Why should the state of Maryland stay out of this fray? A true child of this epoch, it’s betting that gambling will save its coffers, its schools and its racing industry. Gambling to save gambling! Even conservatives endorsed this idea.
What is next? We now have state-sponsored slots. Later we could have state-sponsored massage parlors, peepshows, pole dancing and full-blown casinos. Why not? The state is too pure to indulge in such shenanigans? The state wouldn’t travel that far up the ladder of vices for money? We wouldn’t allow the state to be so crass? Come on folks, even fiscal conservatives who clamor against taxes fell for this deception and back door robbery.
How can slots increase this state’s prosperity? The state will take the money of wretched gamblers of Maryland and misspend it. In this bad economy with unemployment on the rise, most gamblers won’t even throw away money they earned. Instead, they will spend their unemployment checks or borrowed or stolen money. These are the same guys with no money to pay rent to their landlords, or co-pays to their doctors and pharmacists. They often owe money to the shopkeeper down the road from them. They will feed slots until they go bankrupt and then turn to the state for medical assistance and welfare.
We have allowed our state to do this because we want to keep our gamblers to ourselves. We are possessive of them. We don’t want them to cross state lines and ply their vice for kicks at an alien slot machine in Pennsylvania or Delaware. The beautiful state of Maryland, with its hills, valleys and gorgeous pastures in rivalry with the monotonous and flat speck of a state called Delaware, of all things over gamblers and their money! It is enough to make Lord Baltimore turn in his grave.
All I can say is “Shame on us” and confess that Question 2 didn’t get my vote.
Usha Nellore is a writer living in Bel Air. Reach her at [email protected].
